Nicholas Thurkettle

Knight and Day
Director: James Mangold
Writer: Patrick O’Neill
Producers: Todd Garner, Cathy Konrad, Steve Pink, Joe Roth
Stars: Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Peter Sarsgaard, Jordi Mollà, Viola Davis, Paul Dano

Alfred Hitchcock made some classic movies that were essentially expensive foreplay. They were movies that floated over their plots, and used the tools of Hollywood cinema to work the audience into states of laughter, excitement, and arousal, to “play them like an organ” as Hitchcock himself said. We all know what the last shot of North by Northwest meant.

The majority of modern movies have no interest in foreplay. Pornographers show more patience. But Knight and Day’s director James Mangold (Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma) has frequently demonstrated an affinity for the classical approach – his movies look totally contemporary, but they feel richer and savvier. Here, in a globe-trotting spectacle starring Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, and a McGuffin that’s literally heating up by the minute, he puts some lessons from Hitchcock to use in making a movie that is not as great, but far better than its plot.

Cruise is – his interstellar flights of public behavior notwithstanding – a real movie star, and has also been nominated for three Academy Awards. Neither of these achievements is an accident. As an action hero we have watched him do (forgive the pun) the impossible; his performance in this film is a high-wire act that capitalizes on that history, riffing on his mad self-confidence in the face of ridiculous perils, but also bringing with it a wistful quality that wasn’t there in his Top Gun days. Watch him in a conversation with the pretty misfit June Havens (Cameron Diaz) that goes on longer than most movies would allow, longer and more intimate than a character of his expediency normally deems necessary. He has more urgent things that ought to be on his mind, but (forgive the pun), there’s something about this girl.
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Toy Story 3
Director: Lee Unkrich
Writers: story by John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, and Lee Unkrich, screenplay by Michael Arndt
Producer: Darla K. Anderson
Featuring the vocal talents of: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Ned Beatty, Don Rickles, Michael Keaton, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Estelle Harris, John Morris, Jodi Benson, Emily Hahn, Laurie Metcalf, Blake Clark, Teddy Newton, Timothy Dalton

I really do hope this is the last one. Toy Story 3 has a scene where young Andy (voiced by John Morris) is emptying his childhood bedroom, preparing to leave for college, and his mother sees the bare floor and walls and is overcome with emotion. And we remember right in that instant that this very bedroom, back in 1995, is where we as moviegoers first met Woody the cowboy (Tom Hanks), Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), and all their joyfully neurotic toy friends; but also where we first met the animation company Pixar, and the whole concept of a fully-digital animated film.

For a long time, Toy Story was the only world Pixar re-visited, the only movie in its acclaimed roster to get a sequel. That is about to change, with the likes of Cars and Monsters, Inc. now set for the franchise treatment. Andy’s departure as a grown-up young man could truly mark the end of the first generation of Pixar – no longer a rambunctious start-up but the industry’s dominant creative and financial institution.

Their latest film finds them re-trenching on safe ground after more daring spectacles like WALL*E and Up. For much of its running time it is charming, it is imaginative, and it is beautifully rendered by the artists, who take full advantage of the resources purchased by 15 years’ success without violating the aesthetics established by the episodes made in more primitive times. We meet new toys, and enjoy some fast-paced laughs and thrills. But it feels mostly like a succession of gags and adventures featuring characters we already love rather than anything urgent or fresh. It’s only in its ending that Toy Story 3 becomes a very good story, and I will talk more about that in a moment.
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Entertainment Weekly just ran a feature asking what is wrong with this summer’s movies. By extension, it merits asking what has been wrong with movies in 2010, from both the critical and commercial standpoint.

If you ask the masters of the greenlight, who must be smarter than I am since they make so much more money – the problem is…sunspots. Or the Internet. Or mean critics. They themselves are blameless, having only made the movies we asked for.

But did we ask for this? I know that the summer is our dessert season, when we get our action and our fantasies and our cartoons. But did we really ask for ALL dessert for four consecutive months? And did we really ever promise that we would eat any moose turd pie a studio put whipped cream on between the months of May and August?
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I finally saw The Sugarland Express, which is a 70’s car chase movie that is mostly distinguished in film geek circles as the first fully-theatrical feature from Steven Spielberg. He was all of 26 when he shot it. The boy genius on the Universal Studios lot had already been working in television for 3-4 years, and one of his TV movies, Duel (also a feature-length car chase), had been released theatrically in Europe to critical acclaim.

Spielberg was really playful with the camera back then – not in the hyper-cut, constantly-moving style you think of today, but with an uncanny knack for finding an impish way to compose a master shot, even out on location. The main characters are a young couple (played by William Atherton and Goldie Hawn) on the run in Texas with a stolen cop car and a policeman hostage – she broke the husband out of prison because child protective services put their baby with a foster couple, and she wants to steal him back.

There’s a shot where the Captain of the Highway Patrol (Oscar-winning Western movie veteran Ben Johnson) first comes up alongside the fleeing vehicle in his own; and they talk to each other over their radios. And it’s a single, unbroken shot, from Hawn’s perspective in the back seat, as his car pulls up on the left, her husband warns him to keep his distance, he speeds up ahead, then drops back around their other side, then finally falls back in line behind them with the other cars in pursuit. The whole time they’re talking through the radio, and you can see Johnson’s lips moving in the other car. This shot wasn’t pieced together with effects or editing, they’re all ACTING, at full speed on the highway.

There’s another shot, originating from Johnson’s car, where the top half of the screen catches his eyes in his rear view mirror, and the bottom half is filled with the rear window of the hostage vehicle. Hawn’s in the back seat, holding a shotgun in one hand, but playfully finger-drawing on the back window with the other. In a single shot we get to see both her, and him studying her. Not only is it a clever trick of framing, it gets across what’s so important in that moment – that he’s realizing these are just a couple of dumb, scared kids in way over their heads, and he really doesn’t want to have to kill them.

That’s what’s finally so startling to me about The Sugarland Express, because I feel like that spirit makes it utterly foreign to today’s America and today’s audience. I don’t know if it’s 30 years of Reaganomics pitting everyone savagely against each other, or our culture’s full-tilt embrace of the Just World fallacy (in which we are only able to cope with the horrors and injustices we see by finding reasons why the victims must have deserved their fate), but most people not only have no more sympathy for the poor and petty, they actively wish to see their harm. I think a contemporary audience would get restless to the point of outright anger that these tragic fools weren’t tased, beaten with clubs, and riddled with bullets ten minutes into the movie. The hostage, too – who, after all, was stupid enough to get caught.

Originally posted 1/11/05

Closer
Director: Mike Nichols
Writer: Patrick Marber, based on his play
Producers: Mike Nichols, John Calley, Cary Brokaw, Robert Fox
Stars: Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen

I prefer it when movies are About Something over when they Say Something. Closer, based on Patrick Marber’s award-winning play, is a bit of the former and a great deal of the latter, but has the presumption to treat the Something it is Saying – that people lie, screw around, abuse others and don’t really know what they want out of the opposite sex – as news. Yes, I find myself saying, and…? While it’s surprising to hear Julia Roberts, queen of PG-13 platonicism, comparing the flavor of two mens’ emissions, I don’t know that by itself it constitutes a good movie.

It is a long-standing grief of mine that nobody makes movies for grown-ups anymore, so perhaps I should be grateful for Closer’s mere existence, since it is decidedly that. But it comes off as middlebrow satire, witty but mostly quaint when it’s meant to be devastating. I want more.
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Originally posted 1/5/05

Shark Tale
Directors: Vicky Jensen, Bibo Bergeron, Rob Letterman
Writers: Rob Letterman, Michael J. Wilson
Producers: Bill Damaschke, Janet Healy, Allison Lyon Segan
Featuring the voices of: Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Renee Zellweger, Jack Black, Angelina Jolie, Martin Scorsese

So it’s an odd quibble to make in an animated kids’ movie that there is no good reason a fish should need an elevator to get to a top floor apartment. He couldn’t swim up? But I am just picky enough to think that the reason we watch movies set in another world is to bathe our imaginations in the unfamiliar, or something which is familiar but skewed in a unique way.

In Shark Tale, a harmless, diverting, but ultimately less than memorable animated comedy, fish, sharks and other creatures of the deep wear sunglasses, listen to walkmen, make their own TV shows, and dream of owning surround sound systems. Another odd quibble would be how a surround sound system works underwater, but I’m starting to come off as too much the grump.

Maybe what I am asking is, why is this story set underwater at all? Its trappings are the trappings of the human world – the sharks sit in booths at a restaurant and eat off of plates, fish use cell phones to communicate. Most of the characters spend their time upright rather than horizontally. Why did they have to be fish?
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Originally posted 1/4/05

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Director: Wes Anderson
Writers: Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach
Producers: Wes Anderson, Barry Mendel, Scott Rudin
Stars: Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Anjelica Huston, Jeff Goldblum, Noah Taylor, Michael Gambon, Bud Cort, Seu Jorge

It’s fitting that in addition to being an undersea explorer and cataloger of rare and exotic species, Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) is also a filmmaker. We leave The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou feeling great anticipation for Zissou’s next film, though the recent work we have seen has frequently felt meandering, distracted, and missing a certain purpose. But it ended with a bang, suddenly had some guts again, and there is every reason to believe he is back in possession of his mojo.

Which is how I arrive at a most unexpected form of endorsement for this movie. I think it is interesting but imperfect, amusingly detailed but often less than gripping. But it does end very well, and with beauty. And it finds co-writer/director Wes Anderson finishing a great journey in which he has reclaimed his voice. Mostly, it makes me eagerly anticipate his next movie.

While I loved his Rushmore, my reaction to his follow-up The Royal Tenanbaums was more one of admiration and appreciation. I found it too bound up in its precious convolutions to speak to me very emotionally. Aquatic has both the virtues of the former and the vices of the latter in bounteous amount, and I ultimately see it as more of a quest than a conclusive story.
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Originally posted 12/20/04

Beyond the Sea
Director: Kevin Spacey
Writers: Kevin Spacey, Lewis Colick
Producers: Jan Hantl, Arthur E. Friedman, Andy Paterson, Kevin Spacey
Stars: Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, John Goodman, Bob Hoskins, Brenda Blethyn, Caroline Aaron, William Ullrich

This is the second musical biopic this season which features legendary producer/songwriter Ahmet Ertegun as a supporting character. In Ray, he’s a savvy and encouraging mentor in both music and business to Ray Charles, and when he’s not behind the console he’s prodding Ray to find his own sound, or expressing nervousness at his latest groundbreaking escapade; and finally, showing unabashed pride that he negotiated a deal with a rival label so good that Ertegun’s label could never hope to match it. He’s not even the third or fourth lead character in Ray, so to see such well-rounded detail in his depiction is generous and winning.

In Beyond the Sea, Kevin Spacey’s daring, odd, but ultimately off-putting musical/biographical tribute to Bobby Darin, Ertegun has only one scene with any significant dialogue. In it, he’s a record label suit who tries to convince Darin (Spacey) to stick with the teeny-bopper audience that loved his pop hit Splish Splash, and not take a foolish risk by crooning classic standards. Darin wins the argument with an insufferably cute contrived movie moment, then goes on to cut his Sinatra-esque album and prove what a dunce Ertegun was. Ertegun spends the rest of the movie in crowd scenes applauding Darin’s latest triumph.

I think this is a sign of what undermines this interesting failure. The lives, problems, and occupations of everyone around Darin are not really worth his detailed attention except for those inconvenient moments where they get in the way of his big dreams. Then they become opportunities for him to triumph and show what a Legend he is and how small-minded or selfish or shallow They are.
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Originally posted 12/17/04

The Aviator
Director: Martin Scorsese
Writer: John Logan
Producers: Michael Mann, Graham King, Sandy Climan, Charles Evans, Jr.
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, John C. Reilly, Kate Beckinsale, Alec Baldwin, Alan Alda, Adam Scott, Ian Holm, Danny Huston, Kelli Garner

I don’t say this lightly – in the eyes of Howard Hughes, as embodied by Leonardo DiCaprio, I see the same will, the same earth-shifting madness, as T.E. Lawrence, as Charles Foster Kane. The performance is that good, and in The Aviator, it has a film good enough to contain it. One of the best of the year, I’d venture to say.

Martin Scorsese has worn the heavy mantle of Our Greatest Living Filmmaker for many a long year now. And while the wailing power of his filmmaker’s voice has never weakened, his deification has blunted honest critical appraisal of a recent decade of work that has never been less than gripping, but sometimes seemed to escape his storytelling grasp. Even his epic Gangs of New York, an amazing accomplishment, still feels (when we’re able to admit it to ourselves) unresolved, short of a fully-realized vision.

But here, working from a sprawling but always deft and witty script by John Logan (Any Given Sunday, Gladiator), Scorsese the Director roars and soars. It’s his tightest, most confident work since Goodfellas, and as a long-time fan I rejoice – there’s no more uncomfortably ignoring flaws or making apologies for sloppiness. Yes, I think, this is how great he can be.
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Originally posted 12/15/04

Ocean’s Twelve
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: George Nolfi, based on characters created by George Clayton Johnson and Jack Golden Russell
Producer: Jerry Weintraub
Stars: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Vincent Cassel, Bernie Mac, Don Cheadle, Scott Caan, Casey Affleck, Elliot Gould, Carl Reiner, Shaobo Qin, Eddie Jemison

There is the heist movie where we root for our heroes to pull it off, then there is the one where we realize with dread that they won’t get away with it. Ocean’s Eleven, the 2001 remake of the 1960 Rat Pack vehicle about knocking over a Vegas casino, was the former, as is this sequel. Watching with faith that our heroes will somehow come out on top, our enjoyment lies in the discovery of details – details about how impossible the job is, and the details of how they overcome those impossibilities.

The details in the first effort from Clooney and the gang were impeccable – every member of the “Eleven” had a clear task to attend to, and the heist they pulled off was paced well and enjoyably ridiculous while keeping that single all-important stretching toe on the line of plausibility. Like good soul music, you could enjoy the style because the groove was locked in tight. But in Ocean’s Twelve, after going through the motions of reassembling the entire crew, the story labors heavily to keep track of them all, and eventually resorts to just throwing increasing numbers of them in jail to lessen confusion.

If it feels as if they’ve been grafted onto a story that cannot hold their weight, it’s because this is exactly what happened – George Nolfi’s script, originally titled Honor Among Thieves, was set up for John Woo to direct. These characters were dropped in after the financial failure of director Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris and Clooney’s directing debut Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (both underrated and worth a look) made this sequel what an agent would call “smart business”. At least they decided to have some fun in fulfilling this obligation, but unfortunately not all of that fun is passed along to the audience.
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